Jon Tennant has recently completed his award-winning PhD at Imperial College London, where he researched the evolution of crocodiles and extinction through geological time. Now, he is the Communications Director for ScienceOpen, the founder of the Open Science MOOC, an Editor for the PLOS Paleo Community, a freelance science consultant and communicator, part of the Mozilla Open Leadership Cohort, the founder of the publishing platform paleorXiv, and author of kids books, including Excavate Dinosaurs!

Ahmed Oluwagbemi Ogunlaja is a 2016 Mandela Washington Fellow and founder of the advocacy organization Open Access Nigeria, which works to promote online access to research, data & educational resources.

Maria Stratigaki is Vice Mayor of Athens for Social Solidarity, Welfare & Equality since September 2014. She is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Policy of Panteion University teaching on gender, social policy and gender equality policies. She served as the Secretary General for Gender Equality at the Hellenic Ministry of Interior (2009-2012). From 1991 to 1999 she worked at the European Commission’s Unit on equal opportunities between women and men (DG EMPL). Furthermore, during her professional career she has also been the General Director of the Research Centre of Gender Equality- KETHI (1999-2002) and the Centre for Gender Studies of Panteion University (2007-2009).

Sophia Ananiadou is Professor in Computer Science, School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester and Director of the National Centre for Text Mining. Since 2005, she has successfully directed NaCTeM to be currently a fully sustainable centre, carrying out novel, world-leading research on text mining that then informs the provision of services, tools, resources and infrastructure to a variety of users from translational medicine, biology, biodiversity, humanities, health, and social sciences. Research she has led has advanced the state of the art in text mining and contributed in novel ways to: automatic extraction of terminology and term variation; development of robust taggers for biomedical text; automatic extraction of events and their interpretation using machine learning methods; development of large scale terminological resources for biomedicine and biodiversity; linking textual evidence with metabolic and signaling pathways; association mining and hypothesis generation; supporting the development of systematic reviews using novel topic modeling and clustering methods and the development of interoperable text mining infrastructure to facilitate all the above applications (Argo).

Manuel Noya is a researcher turned entrepreneur, BSc Chemical Engineering (USC, Spain) and MSc Materials Science (UPM, Spain). His key areas of know-how are technology scouting, competitive intelligence, NPD (new product development), early-stage startups and innovation strategy. His professional experience involves working for over 4 years as a researcher for NEOKER: an awarded spin-off from USC (Spain). After NEOKER he participated in several RD projects in the materials science arena, at USC (Spain) and SRI International (Menlo Park, CA). Cofounded Linknovate.com in May 2012 in Palo Alto and went through Stanford University accelerator program (StartX) in 2013. Linknovate is a ‘discovery engine’ that helps identify emerging technologies and the key-players behind them. The company provides clients such as BMW AG and REPSOL with competitive intelligence software tools. Manuel is Linknovate.com CEO since 2014, led the company to win the 1st prize of Finodex (EU Open Data Accelerator) in early 2016, two European H2020 grants in 2015 and 2016. Linknovate is now a 7 people company growing internationally.

Michael is the Publisher for F1000 Platforms. He is an open science, open data and open research advocate contributing to F1000’s effort to change the way science is communicated. He played a pivotal role in launching F1000Research in 2013, and now oversees Wellcome Open Research, a new publishing platform owned by Wellcome but run by F1000. Michael previously helped to develop and subsequently manage F1000Posters, the open-access repository of posters and slides in biology and medicine. Michael is an active member of the open science community and has given many talks/seminars/workshops on the subject at international conferences and research institutions. Michael previously studied Chemical Biology at the University of Leeds, where he worked on synthesising a range of potential anti-tumour compounds.

Kathleen Shearer is the Executive Director of COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories), an international association of repository with a membership of over 120 institutions worldwide from 36 countries in 5 continents. COAR is developing a model for scholarly communications based on a global network of open access repositories and actively promotes the role of libraries in the future of scholarly communication. Shearer is also a consultant for several other organizations. She is a research associate with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and a strategic consultant with the US-based Association of Research Libraries (ARL)

Prodromos Tsiavos is the Head of Digital Development at the Onassis Cultural Centre and a Senior Research Fellow at The Media Institute (TMI), London. He is currently advising Athena Research Centre on legal and ethical aspects of data science. Prodromos has worked for the National Hellenic Research Foundation (National Documentation Centre), the European Commission, Oslo University and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is currently teaching Legal and Ethical Aspects of Data Science at the Athens University of Economics and Business. He read law and Information Systems in Athens and London and holds a PhD in Law and Information Systems from the LSE. He has over 120 publications and talks on legal and business aspects of open technologies, digital content and IPR management. Prodromos is chairing the administrative council of the Greek Industrial Property Organisation and serves a member of the Board of the European Patent Academy.

Aliki Giannakopoulou is working in Ellinogermaniki Agogi since June 2014 as a researcher with a focus on projects that relate to responsible research and innovation (Ark of Inquiry, SPARKS, RRI TOOLS and others). Aliki previously worked as a senior project manager at the External Relations department of the Science Museum NEMO, in Amsterdam, Netherlands developing new European collaborations and managing existing European projects. During her time in NEMO she worked on a number of EU funded projects and was also responsible on fundraising. She holds a Masters in Science Communication from the University of West of England and a bachelor's degree in Environmental Science from the University of Aegean in Greece.

Jadranka Stojanovski is an Assistant Professor at the University of Zadar, Department of Information Sciences and research librarian at Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb, with professional experience in designing and creating scholarly publications management systems, providing an open access to the knowledge created by Croatian academic and research community. She is actively engaged in the national projects like Croatian Scientific Bibliography CROSBI, Who's Who in Science in Croatia etc. as well as international projects concerning different aspects of scholarly communication, including the Horizon 2020 project OpenAIRE2020, TD COST Action TD1306 New Frontiers of Peer Review (PEERE) and CA COST Action CA15137 European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (ENRESSH). She is also the National Point of Reference (NPR) for scientific information.

Pandelis Perakakis has a PhD in clinical psychophysiology and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Mind, Brain and Behaviour Research Centre at the University of Granada in Spain. His latest research focuses on the relation between physical exercise, brain and cognition. He is an active advocate of open science since 2005 and has been particularly involved in the investigation of alternative research evaluation models. He is the coordinator of the "Open Peer Review Module for Open Access Repositories" project, funded by OpenAIRE, and a member of the COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) working group on Next Generation Repositories.

Wolfram Horstmann is the director of the Göttingen State and University Library (University of Göttingen) since 2014 and professor at the Institute for Library and Information Science (IBI) at Humboldt-University Berlin. He is executive member and Chair of the Steering Group on Scholarly Communication and Research Infrastructures for the European research library association LIBER and member of the Executive Board of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). In the Research Data Alliance (RDA), he is member of the Organisational Advisory Board and engaged in several groups, e.g. “Libraries for Research Data” (founder and co-chair until 2017) and „Long Tail of Research Data“. Prior, he was Chief Information Officer for Scholarly Information at Bielefeld University, where he was responsible for strategic development of the institutional services for content, data and tools in research and education between 2007 and 2011. He has also served as European project manager for the State and University Library of Göttingen and as head of Publishing Services at the Academic Library Centre in Cologne. He is a biologist by training, having worked in the field of computational neuroscience, did a PhD in the context of Philosophy of Science before he actively turned his attention towards scholarly communication and libraries.

Dr Petr Knoth is a Senior Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media institute, The Open University, UK where he leads a team focusing on scholarly communication technology, in particular the sub-areas of large-scale digital libraries, text and data mining of scientific publications, academic recommender systems, open access (OA)/open science (OS) and research evaluation metrics. Petr is the founder, product and team leader for CORE, a service that aggregates open access articles from a global network of repositories and publishers, delivered in partnership of the Open University and Jisc. Previously, Petr worked as a Senior Data Scientist at Mendeley on information extraction and content recommendation for research. He is one of the creators of Semantometrics.org, a new approach to research evaluation that measures how far each scientific discovery takes us by text analysis.